INSTRUCTIONS
OF THE SPIRIT
poems &
intimations
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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Some of these poems have previously appeared in The Sun, Yellow Silk, Berkeley Poetry Review, Presumptions: A Letter at Large, Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac 2006, and three collections: 1984 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Books); Changing Light: Eternal Cycle of Night and Day edited by J. Ruth Gendler (HarperCollins, 1992); and Blue Peninsula by Madge McKeithen (Farrar Straus Giroux (2006).
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
i can’t shake the moonies
August
The Bandit
The Belladonna Holds A Captive
Pelicanidae
Prize from the Sea
Dream of the SheBear
Early Darkness
List for a Long Night
“the warmth of real objectivity”
Sonnet for Swimmers
VISITING NORTH CAROLINA:
I The Bridge
II Saving and Waste
III The Names
Barefoot
List for a Bad Mood
On Sleeplessness
After Pain
A Birthday Tanka
Lullaby
The Geography of Illness
Someone is Restless in the Kitchen
Homunculus
My God
Odyssey
The Fall
Reversals
Adjustment
Projection
Instructions of the Spirit
Uncertainty Principle
Aftershocks
Bardo
Perfect Happiness
What the Meek Shall Do
Ablaze
“Like the burlesk comedian,
I am abnormally fond of that precision
which creates movement.”
— e.e. cummings
INTRODUCTION
A GOOD POEM is a newborn: compact, energetic, and full of potential. It appears in the world as if by magic, and is not far removed from the formless realm of spirit. Like an infant, a poem should grow on you, revealing more of its character and personality as time goes by. And the surprise of what it may become is usually not apparent at its birth.
When I recently titled a poem “Instructions of the Spirit,” I suddenly recognized the role that poetry has played in my life as a writer. For me a poem arises from a mystical instinct, as if Somebody Up There (or In There?) is trying to tell me something, and it’s my job to figure out what it is and get it down on the page. But as I mentioned, spirit is formless and so its communications consist of hunches, ah-ha’s, oomphs, and bumps in the night. It’s not that spirit speaks in code, because it doesn’t have a language. In fact I’m the one who’s writing in a kind of code: a translation of the ineffable. Whether I write good code or useless code is really up to the reader to determine. All I can do is pay attention to the input and carefully craft the output.
Although I’ve never been prolific as a poet — this collection represents most of the poems I consider printable that I wrote from age twenty to fifty — I’ve always considered poetry to be the “root work” of all the other writing I’ve done, from journalism to fiction to essays, even advertising and public relations. Poetry is at the core of my writing because it is both the most instinctive of all the scribbler’s forms and the hardest to refine. Even though most poems seem to write themselves at first, I sometimes find myself tinkering with the words decades after I thought they were finished. This is another way in which poems are like children: they have their own life but the author can influence their maturing over the years.
The poems are followed by remarks and reflections that I call “intimations.” These brief asides are not attempts to explain the poems, because anyone who’s ever sat through Poetry Appreciation 101 knows that explanation can kill a poem right off. But I do try to provide a few intimate glimpses into where poems have come from or where they might be going, much as I would do at a public reading. Since I can’t give readings everywhere this book goes, these intimations are my stand-ins for a personal appearance. I also hope that these asides encourage the reader to take another look at each poem, because any good poem usually requires a second reading to get acquainted with it. The baby who at first seems to be speaking gibberish may actually be giving voice to a revealing code.
The poems here are arranged in a rough chronological order. Some of the early ones seem “young” to me in retrospect, without as much precision as I would like a poem to have now.
But my discretion in choosing work for this volume relied less on determining technical competence than instinctive content; I asked myself if each poem conveyed some of the spark that made me write it down. If so, the poem made the grade for this collection. My aim is to share as many of those sparks as I can, so that the reader may more readily understand the hunches, ah-ha’s, oomphs, and bumps in the night that spirit provides to us all. Because, oddly enough, it’s our ability to translate such weird and mysterious instructions from beyond the pale that makes life make sense.
i can’t shake the moonies
they are on to me on sidewalks
transit platforms
and in the library
they are always asking me to
dinner with many moonies:
won’t i come float in the chasm of loss
with them?
won’t i revive the infant
disciplined within me?
don’t i want to keep
bewilderment at bay?
when i tell the hundredth one no
he is more assured than the others.
he says “it’s all right.
you must be a chosen one.”
great; just my luck
Growing up in the South where I was asked too often if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, I was happy to think 1 had escaped evangelism when I reached the streets of San Francisco at age 22. Instead I seemed to become a magnet /or religious salespeople of a different stripe. Looking back, I’m intrigued to recognize how spiritual experience wore its most annoying disguise at a time when I considered myself too intelligent for religion of any sort. I guess the signs were indicating that this aspect of my life just wasn’t going to go away.
August
From the crackling brown, littered
field of fallow walks a crazy maiden.
She’s been leaping from log to log
in a ritual of secret celebration, and
her face is wet, even her long breasts
are sweating, her shirt thrown somewhere
in the weeds. Her burnt cheeks are not smooth,
her black eyes are not gentle, and her feet
are like leather from so many escapes
into the rough.
She is worried by what she may have
forgotten, and what might lie ahead
beyond her control.
Perhaps tomorrow the field will be
leveled by a runway, her jumping-logs
buried in driven earth,
the dry aroma of the tall grass
overpowered by fuel oil and tarmac.
Then she would borrow money she
could not repay, to fly to the tropics
and learn how to live in a
rainforest. She has seen a movie
about this. She could do it.
Some people are born into a wilder species than the rest of us, their nature a step or two closer to pure animal instinct. Clothing never really suits them and conventional lifestyles are out of the question. These human creatures are always a reminder that spirit drives all levels of being, and is not necessarily interested in fomenting civilization as we know it.
The Bandit
Even among this maze of lighted houses
Arises the disorderly smell of raccoon:
the bandit,
the fierce organizer,
one-who-walks-in-a-huddle.
They come down from the dry hills
By who knows what paths —
surely not along the road —
Come to overturn garbage
And seethe at the dull and domestic:
dogs, cats,
people’s toys.
They freeze in the sudden light
And growl with a body improbably deep.
Late in the night
They and their energetic children
root and roust beneath your house
As if building a place of their own
Down there. Their tricky hands
turn out halfhuman noises
which time and time again
Poke cleanly through your dreams.
Embedded within our consciousness is the silent history of other creatures, older ways of seeing, and natural environments unaltered by human influences. Evolution and technical progress have changed us from neighbors to invaders everywhere we live, but sometimes other creatures turn the tables on us. They “move in” not just on our real estate, but on our awareness as well – challenging us to recall all that we’ve seen through other eyes, sensed with different antennae, and understood before we knew language.
The Belladonna Holds A Captive
This complicated flower,
growing once and twice from its beginning,
curling into white waxed peaks
holds a secret sunk and rooted by its organs.
A terrible bodyless beast is snared inside,
refused form or evolution
by some ancient decision of grace.
A snarl that could have frozen hearts
is wrapped in silence, deep in green sheathing...
The venom of the beast is the fragrance of the flower.
When we enter the room,
we find the air painted with sweet rancor.
Admittedly, we tend to see ourselves in the world around us, but how often are we seeing more than we know about ourselves? When I studied this flower, I had the strong intuition that it could have manifested in a different form with the same root energy. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sensing an important truth of the spiritual path: We have the capacity to shape-shift with our own consciousness, turning the brutality of the unbridled ego into something like a “sweet rancor.” The point of spiritual growth is not to achieve an unalloyed goodness, but to find the full depth and complexity of our power.
Pelicanidae
Somewhere a crescent of fishermen
advance in shallow waters,
forcing confusion below them,
selecting what they will from
random flashes of panic
but the singular flyer I know
rests in a tuck on a white rock island
amid a warm blue sky and
the chill, bluer sea.
In cooling repose it bleeds salt
and air, the flat eyes of alacrity
betraying naught but a windy silence.
The still collection of subtle,
scattered hints from the listing world
mounts until
a sudden trigger to flight
unhinges the arms of feather & bone
to climb upon the long, broad ribbon
of the free hunt, a swift,
measured wheeling over the far currents
which yield life to the quick
and murmur the rhythm of return.
What if birds are the most spiritually advanced of all mortal beings, having honed their bodies down to little more than weightless feathers and hollow bones? I’ve dreamt of flying in precise maneuvers, as if I have an instinctive knowledge I can’t use in my present shape and form. Am I recalling a pterodactyl lifetime, or anticipating a freewheeling way of life yet to come?
Prize from the Sea
A boy holds a small body, completely given
on his palm, its mouth and fan ends
both turning down, learning gravity.
He presents his spoiling trophy
to the sunshine, the cellular gleam
of its whiteness not yet faded, but drying,
dulling - light following life loosed
in the capture.
The boy is proud now.
He was a little frightened by the
animal’s acrobatics of yielding,
the wild arcs and wet slamming,
its reflexive dance into the fatal
discomfort of the great beyond.
It breathed in water.
It slept in the currents.
Death is always a rude shock, especially when we first learn that we have a hand in it – and then again, when we recognize that death will eventually lay a hand upon us. Spiritual maturity arrives with the realization that the life and death of the body are not all that matter. In fact that realization is where we turn the corner from living a life dictated by fear and greed to a life imbued with originality and generosity.
Dream of the SheBear
Somehow I thought you had come home unannounced,
creeping early, soft and naked from the airport,
slipping into bed behind me,
luggage abandoned on the circling carousel.
I decided to pretend sleeping a few moments longer.
But your surprise was more complex, for I felt
your spoonshape embrace enlarging around me.
Soon you were ten feet tall, and your clasp
bestowed the forbidden power of animal wildness.
A shebear! I thought, and the world behind me
turned dark, fragrant, and slick with
all-night rain before a clearing dawn.
A moment longer I listened to waking songs
of the crickets, the birds, and the
unnameable things —
and then I turned to pounce, but instantly
you shifted into deer intelligence,
a four-legged, springing ballerina.
My opening eyes glimpsed only your last bound
over night’s receding edge, as you raced to stay
within a world safe from human travelers.
The experience of dreams suggests that we live more lives than our daily one. Our present form may be a composite of former shapes, dimly remembered instincts, and ancient yearnings. When we sleep together we mingle realms of natural history.
Early Darkness
Think of it as ink:
an indigo dye descending
between the leaves of the trees
and down to the grasses.
There is no dying of the light —
just the washing of a bowl,
and overturning it for night.
When day arrives we must write with
bottled darkness.
In the night we can dream
free messages of light.
An artist friend was a little depressed about the advent of long nights in the winter, so I tried to reinterpret the circumstances for her. This poem is also about how light and dark always contain each other: Our dreams can be full of light in the midst of darkness, while much of our unconscious fades to black in the daytime. When we write, we use little squiggles of black to bring what is hidden back to light.
List for a Long Night
There is a part of the brain
that knows only faces;
there is a pattern for my hand
that follows your face only:
quiet eyes, skin warm and light,
the upward arching mouth and
fine hair of stilled phrases.
All around your moonlike radiance
there is the darkness.